'Just getting started' - FedEx turns 35

Express pioneer sees nothing but opportunity

Frederick W. Smith, chairman, president and CEO of FedEx Corp., turns on a long-darkened clock at the company's hub Monday night during a celebration of its 35th anniversary. FedEx made its first deliveries April 17, 1973, creating the overnight-express industry.

Nikki Boertman/The Commercial Appeal

Presumably the founder of a Fortune 100 company has many cold, dark nights.

Monday night was one of the happy ones for Frederick W. Smith, who lit a long-darkened clock at the hub to commemorate the 35th anniversary of FedEx Corp. before hundreds of the employees who made it possible.

"I get asked all the time by people: 'Did you ever think it was going to get this big?'" Smith said. "My answer to them -- and I mean this sincerely, because when we sit in our management meetings today and see the tremendous opportunity for our company, the enormous macro-economic trends that we sit right in the middle of, I always give the same answer: As best I can tell, this outfit's just getting started."

Smith, founder, chairman and CEO, visited with hub managers at about 9 p.m., shortly before the late-night sort in a hangar replete with purple and orange flowers, purple tablecloths and cakes shaped like courier vans.

"That clock is a way to look back at our roots and the rich history we have," said Dave Bronczek, president and chief executive of the overnight division, which accounts for about 70 percent of FedEx's $36 billion in revenue.

"Newer technology made it obsolete in the early '80s. Putting it back up is symbolic of where we've come from and that our roots are still grounded here," said Bronczek, who started in 1976 loading planes at 4:30 a.m. before class at Kent State University.

"It was our hourly employees who said we ought to get that old clock out and fired up again. It's terrific not only for the older people who remember it, but for the new people, too," he said.

On April 17, 1973, Smith and 389 employees delivered 186 packages to 25 U.S. cities in a dream he had taken to the mat several times.

On Thursday, the company's true anniversary, FedEx will deliver 3.6 million packages to 220 countries and territories, a fact that is not lost on Jackie Davis, a 21-year employee who started at the hub fresh out of college and has worked there ever since.

"Lighting the clock means growth and stability. It means we're looking for a bright future," she said, with perfectly unwavering confidence.

"This is a new beginning for us. Of course, I believe that," she said. "We're innovative in what we do and how we believe in people."

Davis, who started loading planes and jokes that she is still short enough to walk around in the belly of a jet, starts work at 7 p.m. and finishes each morning at about 4 or 5 a.m., along with about 10,000 others who watch the hub spring to action each night.

"This is what we deliver," Davis, says pointing to the action beginning to mount around the hub campus. "If anything exciting is going to happen, it's going to happen in the Memphis hub."

Countless others here honed their work skills in the hub and remember the euphoria they felt working for Smith.

One is Bill Kabel, pilot No. 191 at FedEx, who started flying a Falcon in 1973 after hearing the pilots described as "the guys coming in in little purple planes, wearing blue jeans and hair a little longer than you'd think," he said.

"They were mavericks, and I decided to look them up."

By early 1974, he was flying all night with a crew that made stops in Cincinnati, Baltimore, Cleveland and Dayton, Ohio.

"Fred was always around in the early days," he said. "He's such a smart guy and such a motivator, we'd all look at each other and realize that he's the kind of guy you'd put a knife in your teeth and follow anywhere."

Kabel, 62, said his career provided him a larger sense of honor and prestige than any job he could have had flying for American Airlines, which had been his ambition.

"We maybe had more because we had the advantage of feeling like startup people," he said.

FedEx's hub and Memphis

More than 90 percent of the cargo that makes Memphis the world's busiest cargo airport comes from FedEx Corp. Six nights a week, 150 planes land here in rapid succession, disgorging bellies full of cargo.

About 1.5 million packages a night are routed to their eventual destination by traveling more than 300 miles of conveyor belts interlaced with shoots and traps in the hub's primary matrix.

By 2 a.m., they are loaded and ready for takeoff to every ZIP code in America and nearly every country in the world.